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“Jeff, we love you; if we fail, it’s not your failure, it’s ours. You won’t be the one to blame. But you

won’t fail, Jeff. I know you won’t…”

Her arms sheltered him, their thoughts blended, and the upsurge of love and desire in him was somethinghe had never known, never guessed.

Here was no easy conquest, no cheap girl from the spacemen’s bars, to give his body a moment’s easebut leave his heart untouched. Here was no encounter to leave the aftertaste of lust in his memory, andthe sickening of loneliness when he sensed, as he had sensed so often, the woman’s emptiness as deep ashis own disillusion.

Taniquel. Taniquel, who had been closer than any previous lover from that first instant of rapportbetween them, from her first accepting kiss. How was it that he had never known? He shut his eyes, thebetter to taste this closeness, the closeness that was more intense than the touch of lips or arms.

Taniquel whispered, “I’ve sensed… your loneliness and your need, Jeff. But I was afraid to let myselfshare them until now. Jeff, Jeff—I’ve taken your pain to myself, let me share this too.”

“But,” Kerwin said hoarsely, “I’m not afraid now. I was afraid only because I felt alone.”

“And now,” she spoke his thoughts, sinking into his arms with a surrender so absolute that he seemed

never to have known a woman before, “you’ll never be alone again.”

Chapter Ten: The Way of Arilinn

«^»

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If Kerwin had visualized the planetary survey as something to be done by magic, concentration into thematrixes, a quick mental process, he was quickly shown how wrong he was. The actual rapport work, Kennard told him, would come later; meanwhile there were preparations to be made, and only the Tower telepaths themselves could make them.

It was almost impossible to focus telepathic rapport, so they explained to him, unless the object orsubstance had first been brought into rapport with the telepath who would be using it. Kerwin hadimagined that the gathering of the materials would be done by outsiders or menials; instead, he himself, asthe least skilled in actual telepathic matrix work, was put to several small technical jobs in the preliminarystages. He had learned something of metallurgy on Terra; assisted by Corus, they located samples ofvarious metals, and, working in a laboratory that reminded Jeff of an Earth-history conception of analchemist’s study, smelted them down and with primitive but surprisingly effective techniques, reducedthem to pure form. He wondered what on earth they were going to do with those miniature samples ofiron, tin, copper, lead, zinc, and silver. He was even more confused when Corus started makingmolecular models of these metals, kindergarten affairs with little clay balls on sticks, pausing at times toconcentrate on the metals and “sound” the atomic structure with his matrix. Kerwin quickly picked up thetrick of this—it was not unlike his early experiments with glass and crystal structure.

Meanwhile Taniquel was out daily in the air-launch with Auster and Kennard, examining great maps,carefully coordinating them with photographs (made on excellent Terran cameras) of the terrain. Sometimes they were away for two or three days at a time.

Taniquel had explained to Kerwin why they needed the maps and pictures of the countryside. “Yousee,” she explained, “the picture—and the map—becomes a symbol of that piece of ground, and we canestablish rapport with it through the picture. There was a time when a good psychic could find water, orminerals in the ground, but he had to be walking over it at the time.”

Kerwin nodded; even on Earth, where psi powers were still not much regarded, there werewater-finders and dowsers. But on a
 
map
 
?

“We don’t find them on the map, silly,” Taniquel said. “The map is a device to establish contact with that piece of land, the territory
 
represented
 
by the map. We could find it by pure psychism, but it’s easier if we have something that directly represents it; like a photograph. We use the map to establish the contact, and to mark what we find there.”

Kerwin supposed the principle was the same as the folk-tale of the man who killed his enemy by stickingpins in his image; but as the memory came into his mind, Taniquel blanched and said, “No one trained at Arilinn would ever,
 
ever
 
do such a wicked thing!”

“But the principle is the same,” Kerwin said, “using an object as a focus for the powers of the mind.” But Taniquel still would not admit it. “It isn’t the same at all! That’s meddling with the mind, and it’s unlawful and—
 
dirty
,” she said vehemently, then looked at him with suspicion. “You took the monitor’s oath, didn’t you?” she demanded, as if wondering how anyone sworn that way could even have such thoughts. And Kerwin sighed, knowing he would never understand Taniquel. They shared so much, they had been so often in rapport, he felt that she was utterly known to him: And yet there were times when, as now,

she became alien, wholly a stranger.

While they were making the maps and checking their accuracy with the Terran photographs (Kerwin,who knew something of cameras from his years on Terra, was pressed into service developing, printing,and enlarging the enormous aerial views), Corus finished the work of making the metal samples; then Elorie brought them in on the work of constructing the matrix lattices, or “screens.”

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This was hard, demanding work, both mentally and physically; they worked with molten glass, whoseamorphous structure was nevertheless solid enough to hold the matrix crystals in the desired structure, asolid network encased in glass. Corus, whose PK potential was enormously high, had the task of holdingthe glassy stuff in a state of liquid pliancy without heat. Kerwin attempted this several times, but itfrightened him to see Elorie plunge her frail white hands into the apparently boiling mass. Rannirl saiddryly that if Kerwin lost his nerve and his control they could all be badly hurt, and refused to let him havecontrol of the glass while they were working inside it. Layer after layer of the glass was poured, Elorieactivating, with her own matrix, the tiny sensitized crystals suspended inside each layer; Rannirl, standingby to take control when hers faltered; and meanwhile following the whole process on a monitor screennot unlike the one Kerwin had seen in the house of the two matrix mechanics in Thendara, monitoring thecomplex interior crystalline structures being built up in the layers of glass, by a process analogous to themonitoring process that Taniquel, or Neyrissa, could do with the body of one of them.

Rannirl said once, at the end of a long stint working with the lattices, “I shouldn’t say this; but Elorie iswasted as a Keeper. She has the talent to be a technician; and she never will be, because we need Keepers too badly. If there were more women willing to work as Keepers—a Keeper doesn’t need thatkind of talent, a Keeper doesn’t even have to learn to monitor; she simply has to hold the energon flows. Zandru’s hells, we could use a damned
 
machine
 
for that. I could build an amplifier that would do it, onethat any good mechanic could handle! But it’s traditional, using a Keeper’s polarities and energy flows. And I can’t even teach Elorie as much as she wants to know about mechanics; she needs all her energyfor the work she does in the circle! Damn it—” He lowered his voice and said, as if he expected to beoverheard and blasted, “Keepers are an anachronism in this day and age. Cleindori was right, if theycould only see it!” But when Kerwin stared and asked him what he had meant, Rannirl shook his head,tightened his mouth and said, “Forget I said it. It’s a dangerous point of view.” He would say no more,but Kerwin caught a fragment of thought about fanatics who thought that a Keeper’s ritual virginity wasmore important than her efficiency at the matrixes, and that this point of view was going to destroy the Towers sooner or later, if it hadn’t already.

Working with them, he felt his own sensitivity growing, day by day. He had no trouble now in visualizingalmost any atomic structure; the work he had done with Neyrissa, in learning to monitor his own internalorgans and processes, was beginning to carry over to seeing energy fields and atomic processes, and hehad no trouble in maintaining the stasis in any crystalline structure. He was beginning to sense the internalstructure of other substances now; once he found himself aware of oxidation of the iron in aslowly-rusting doorhinge; in his first unsupervised effort, he pulled out his matrix and with a fierce mentaleffort reversed the process.

He still got the splitting headaches when he was actually working with the screens—though now he couldhandle a shift in the relay nets unassisted—and the effort was tremendous, racking, each expenditure ofpsychic energy leaving him spent and drained, his body demanding enormous quantities of food andsleep.

He understood, now, the gargantuan appetites they all had—Elorie, for instance; he had been amused ather childlike greediness for sweets, and had been astonished at seeing so frail and dainty a little girl putaway quantities of food that would have satiated a horse-drover. But now he realized that he was hungryall the time; his body, drained of energy, demanded replacements with ravenous hunger. And when theday’s work was completed—or called to a halt because Elorie could not endure any more of thestrain—and Kerwin could rest, or when Taniquel had a little leisure to spend with him, he found that hecould only fling himself down beside her and sleep.

“I’m afraid I’m not a very ardent lover,” he apologized once, half sick with chagrin; Taniquel close to

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him, loving and willing, but the only desire in his body was an exhausted hunger for sleep. Taniquel

laughed softly, bending to kiss him.

“I know; I’ve been around matrix workers all my life, remember? It’s always that way when there’s work in hand—you have only so much energy, and it all goes into the work, and there’s nothing left. Don’t worry about it.” She laughed, a small mischievous chuckle. “When I was training at Neskaya, we used to test ourselves, sometimes, one of the men and I; we’d lie down together—and if either of us could even
 
think
 
of anything but sleep, we’d know we’d been cheating, not giving all we had to the matrix work!”

He felt a sudden inner storm of jealousy for the men she had known that way; but he was really too tiredto care.

She stroked his hair. “Sleep,
 
bredu
 
—we’ll have time together when this is over, if you still want me.”

“If I still want you?” Kerwin sat upright, staring at the girl. She lay back on the pillow, her eyes closed, the freckles pale on her pixie face, her hair loosened, sunbright on the sheets. “What do you mean, Tani?”

“Oh, people change,” she said vaguely. “Never mind that now. Here—” She pulled him gently down,

her light hands caressing his forehead. “Sleep, love; you’re worn out.”

Weary as he was, the words had driven sleep from his mind. How could Taniquel doubt—or was thegirl in the grip of some premonition? Since they had been lovers, he had been happy; now, for the firsttime, disquiet moved in him, and he had a sudden mental flash of Taniquel, hand in hand with Auster,walking along the battlements of the tower. What had been between Taniquel and Auster?

He
 
knew
 
Taniquel cared for him in a way he had never guessed possible with any woman. They were intotal harmony. He knew, now, why his casual affairs with women had never gone beneath the surface;the unrecognized telepathic sensitivity in him had picked up the fundamental shallowness of the kind ofwomen he had known; he had chided himself for being an idealist, wanting more than any woman couldgive. Now he knew it was possible; his relationship with Taniquel had brought a whole dimension intofocus; his first taste of shared passion and emotion, real intimacy. He
 
knew
 
Taniquel cared for him; couldshe possibly care for him so deeply, if she cared for someone else that way?

Many disquiets began to come into focus as he lay awake, his head throbbing, of course. Now it wasclear to him; everyone in the Arilinn Tower knew they were lovers. Small things he had not noticed at thetime, a smile from Kennard, a meaningful glance from Mesyr, even the small interchange with

Neyrissa—
 
Are you jealous
?—now took on significance.

And I never realized; in a telepath culture they would take it for granted, there would be no suchthing as privacy and I never understood
… Suddenly the thought was violent, embarrassing: Telepathsall, were they reading his thoughts, his emotions, spying on what he had shared with Taniquel? Scaldingembarrassment flooded him, as if he had had some shameful dream of walking naked in the public squareand waked to find that it was true…